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Subs eavesdrop on crashing fish stocks

By Michelle Knott

A ROBOT submarine that can be taught to recognise any fish species could soon be helping conservationists find out if fish populations really are as close to collapse as some suspect.

Fish stocks are currently estimated by measuring the size of sample catches. But the samples are often caught at points up to 100 kilometres apart, leading to potentially misleading assumptions about how many fish there are lurking between the sampling points.

But there might be a better way. Daniel Doolittle and his colleagues at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point have developed an …